The UTIK-UTOK Formulation: Cultivating A Unified Theory of the Tree in the Knower
A Four-Part Blog Series by Dr. Baron Short*
Introduction and Overview of the Blog Series by Gregg Henriques
I (Gregg) am delighted to be sharing this four-part blog series by Dr. Baron Short. It lays out what I think is an exciting development for UTOK, the Unified Theory of Knowledge. As he notes, UTOK is grounded in a natural scientific epistemology, and my primary focus has been to develop a psychological science formulation that is both coherent and up to the task of framing “human mental behavior.” Although the framework was generated out of the very practical concerns I faced in the clinic room, my writing has been mostly on developing the theory and philosophy. The consequence is that UTOK is a complicated network of ideas that can be difficult for many people to relate to or to see how to apply it in their lives.
Dr. Short’s “UTIK” formulation enters the arena from a different place. It starts with phenomenology and the subject experiencing and reflecting on the world. From there, it lays out a path to connect to UTOK in a way that I find exhilarating and think will open new avenues for people to relate to. What follows in this four-part series is an articulation of the “Unified Theory of the Tree in the Knower.” The first blog, shared here, invites folks to reflect on their philosophy of life and living and provides some grounding for getting clear about one’s worldview. Each week, a new blog will be posted. Part II shifts from philosophical reflection to Dr. Short’s “full spectrum mindfulness” to help folks frame how they experience the world and how they can reflect on and integrate those experiences to better grasp both their conscious awareness and sense of self. This frames what Dr. Short calls the TIK, or the theory in the knower.
Part III then explicitly bridges into the UTOK formulation. Building on the metaphors and imagery, Dr. Short, explains how we can frame our phenomenology via the metaphor of a “tree in the knower”. This aligns directly with the basic design of UTOK’s iQuad Coin. The side with the iQuad Symbol represents the unique human knower. Then you rotate and flip the Coin to align it with the Tree of Life. Dr. Short really brings this to life.
Finally, in Part IV, Dr. Short bridges the philosophical reflections in Part I with the UTOK philosophy. This invites the reader to place their “small m.e.” frame (i.e., the way they think about and experience the world) with the Big M.E. proposal afforded by UTOK.
The result of the series is a wonderful, mirror image complement for UTOK. The system was built on a third person, behavioral science frame, and now, via UTIK, we have a clear path for directly bridging it with phenomenology. The iQuad Coin represented this path formally and serves as a crucial placeholder to connect the subject, and now, with this series by Dr. Short, we can see the connection to the subject can more be pragmatically realized.
UTIK-UTOK Part I: Formulating a Theory in the Knower
UTOK, the Unified Theory of Knowledge, founded by Professor Gregg Henriques, is a new philosophical system that attempts to unify psychology, ground it in the objective natural sciences, and reconnect the natural sciences with subjective and intersubjective domains of knowing.
Although only named in 2020, the project that became UTOK has been in development for almost 30 years. It can be viewed thus far as a 3-step project. The first step involve developing a unified metatheoretical approach to psychology that is properly nested in the natural sciences. Henriques worked on this from the mid-1990s until publishing his book, A New Unified Theory of Psychology, in 2011.
After that, he started blogging on Psychology Today and returned to the problem of psychotherapy. Between 2011 and 2016, he worked to develop a unified metatheoretical approach to psychotherapy. It grounds psychotherapy in a unified psychological science that assimilates and integrates the key insights from the major schools of thought. This “common core” of psychotherapy was the theme of his recent presidency for the Society for the Exploration of Psychotherapy Integration. The CALM-MO flashlight can be thought of as representing the key principles and processes for addressing neurotic loops.
The third step took place from 2016 and has continued to the present. It involves the construction of a complete philosophical system that resolves what Henriques has labeled the “Enlightenment Gap.” This is the problem of placing the mind in relationship to matter and objective, scientific knowledge in relationship to subjective and intersubjective knowledge. Henriques’ latest book, A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap, provides an academic treatment for how his system can revolutionize our understanding of science with a new map of Big History that clarifies the nature of psychology and solves the mind-body problem.
Importantly, this book does not mention some key aspects of UTOK. For example, it does not mention either the UTOK Garden or the iQuad Coin. Why? According to Henriques, these ideas are simply too far outside the traditional academic paradigm to be included in a standard academic treatise. However, he believes that over time, as we shift into a new era of knowledge construction, these new “psycho-technologies” will be recognized to be essential parts of a comprehensive, metatheoretical (or metaphysical) system that includes objective, subjective, and intersubjective knowing.
The UTOK Garden is a sincere, ironic artistic representation of his system that affords a dialectical dance of science and the humanities. Included in the Garden are seeds that can be planted to grow trees. The iQuad Coin is UTOK’s placeholder for the human psyche. This refers to our unique, subjective experience of being in the world. The iQuad Coin has the iQuad Symbol on one side, and the UTOK Tree of Life, which sits in the center of the Garden on the other side.
In this series of blogs, I want to grow the Coin-Garden aspect of UTOK. In more common language, this is the relationship between the knower, which in UTOK is represented by the Coin, and one’s general philosophy for living wisely, which is represented by the Garden. Specifically, I want to help articulate how UTOK allows us to be situated our unique, human conscious experience of being in the world in a rich and powerful way.
The goal of UTIK is to help folks learn how to connect to UTOK by starting with themselves. You see, UTOK is, first and foremost, grounded in science. And much of Gregg’s work has been laying out the philosophical and scientific argument for how to update our shared worldview. As such, it has paid less attention to phenomenology and how folks can actually apply it to their own conscious experience of being in the world. However, I think there are rich ways to connect our subjective experiences of being in the world to UTOK. The goal of this blog series is to guide you on how you can “grow a unified theory of the tree in the knower.”
UTIK stands for the “Unified Theory of the Tree in the Knower.” UTIK starts with the “Personal Theory of Knowledge” in the Knower, which I will abbreviate as “PTOK”. In plain language, PTOK refers to your worldview and invites you to reflect on your philosophical commitments and explore how you experience the world and your mind. Thus, UTIK is about connecting your PTOK to UTOK.
Take a moment and think about what you believe to be true and good. Consider these questions: How do you frame the societal context or epoch that you are in? How do you think about reality and how do you know about it? What are your values? What do you think about death or the end of humanity or the universe?
The technical terms for these reflections are metacontextual (i.e., the zoomed out big picture way to frame the context of knowing), ontology (i.e., one’s theory of reality), epistemology (i.e., one’s theory of knowledge and how one justifies what is true), axiology (i.e., one’s theory of value and aesthetics), and eschatology (i.e., reflections on the end of times). Following Henriques, we can call this network of philosophical concepts, categories, and assumptions, one’s “metaphysical” commitments. When we examine these carefully, we shift from a invisible, implicit to an explicit knowing of how we make sense of reality. In other words, I want you to become conscious and explicit about your PTOK.
In addition to these explicit philosophical considerations, UTIK also emphasizes conscious experience. Specifically, it embraces the first-person empirical position of bringing information in through our senses and attending to our attention and awareness of being in the world. To facilitate this, in Part II of this blog series I introduce what I call “full spectrum mindfulness.” It shines the light on how we can be mindful of our awareness, our attention, our selves, and adopt a meta-cognitive, reflective position on our lives.
With your PTOK being framed by your philosophical commitments and empirical experiences of being in the world, in Part III and IV of this blog series I follow the implicit imagery of UTOK’s Coin-Garden relationship and invite the reader to consider the process of cultivating the Tree in the Knower. In Part III, I will present a new metaphorical tree that can function as a frame for your ontological experience. In Part IV, I will connect it to being in the Garden and living wisely.
My hope for the ultimate result of this blog series is that we can understand what makes us “tick” by cultivating the UTIK-UTOK relation. In the remainder of this post, I lay out the metaphysical frame of the Theory in Knower.
PTOK, Part I — Your Personal Theory of Knowledge
Embedded in the vision logic of UTOK is a deep connection between the human psyche and “metaphysical empirical” knowledge. This relationship is found in the connection between the iQuad Coin and the MEme Flower. The iQuad Coin represents the unique particular human experiencing identities in the here-and-now. The small m.e. circles on the MEme flower represent each individual’s metaphysical empirical processes of knowing. The two are intimately connected, such that one’s iQuad Coin can be thought of as being equivalent to one’s small m.e. way of knowing.
Consistent with the division between conceptual knowledge, represented by the ‘m’ and empirical, experiential knowledge represented by the ‘e’, in this blog and the next, I frame your PTOK as reflecting on your philosophical commitments for the ‘m’ and full spectrum, multi-modal mindfulness for the ‘e’. In the remainder of this blog, I lay out some of the key aspects of a philosophical, metaphysical system that I invite the reader to reflect about. That is, I am helping you get clear on your PTOK.
Metacontext
For my PTOK, I take an explicit, transcendent naturalistic approach to psycho-spirituality and am oriented toward a theoretical-experiential inside-out, bottom-up rebuild of humanity to address the metacrisis at the 5th joint point.
Most folks will be unfamiliar with these terms, so I will clarify their meaning. The core tenets of Transcendent Naturalism (TN) have been laid out in a Youtube series by Drs. Vervaeke and Henriques. Many guests have joined them, and TN offers an extended view of naturalism that includes a strong transcendence. Extended naturalism is a philosophical framework includes the known and knower, while strong transcendence appeals to a real reality that includes but is beyond the limits of experience and observable measurement. Psychospirituality can be defined as the inclusion of psychological and the spiritual qualities, including practices and rituals, in the integration of human well-being. Spirituality involves the recognition of a feeling or sense or belief that there is something greater than one’s self, something more to being human than sensory experience, and that the greater whole of which one is part is cosmic or divine in nature.
This approach is theoretical-experiential in that it serves as a conceptual frame that unifies one’s subjectivity generating from ongoing examination of experience and from that empirical position always open to further change. Inside-out and bottom-up invokes doing the inner work of self-knowledge and transformation that can subsequently be actualized in daily life, while bottom-up suggests a ground up rebuild of society and civilization by starting with individuals.
The metacrisis is a term coined to capture the multiple, interrelated crises (meaning crisis, mental health crisis, ecological crisis, techno-digital crisis) we face individually and collectively as a civilization. The 5th joint point, coined by Dr. Henriques, relates to the transition place we collectively are finding ourselves as nature is perhaps moving up another phase of behavioral complexity. It has already moved from matter to life to mind to culture and now emerging another layer of behavioral complexity coming from and through our digital layer of technologies. In sum, TIK has a metacontext of a transcendent naturalistic psychospirituality that takes a theoretical-experiential inside-out, bottom up rebuild of humanity to address the metacrisis at the 5th joint point. That’s a mouthful!
Ontology and Epistemology
Ontology is a philosophical term that deals with what is real, what really exists, and categories of existence. Epistemology deals with how one knows what one knows or what are the methods by which one knows something, such as scientific method. UTOK is agnostic regarding the ultimate nature of reality. Through the Enlightenment Gap, it argues that we are lacking in a clear, coherent, descriptive metaphysical system that organizes our empirical knowledge, both our scientific empirical knowledge and our first-person empirical knowledge. UTOK’s ToK System serves as its map of science and natural behavior, and it identifies the ontological planes of behavioral complexity as Matter, Life, Mind, and Culture. The current proposal is that we can identify a metaphorical “tree in the knower” that has ontological planes of experiential complexity that will be described in detail in Part III of this blog. And whereas the ToK epistemically carries a natural science stack which studies and evolves the knowledge of different planes of behavioral existence, one’s PTOK is examined subjectively via a full spectrum, multimodal mindfulness to know one’s self at different experiential planes of existence.
Axiology
Axiology is a philosophical study of goodness or value. UTOK carries values of truth, beauty, and goodness and as part of the wisdom-energy icon, the ultimate justification is “be that which enhances dignity and well-being with integrity.” Right on! As part of UTIK, the axiological highest aspiration is phrased “Realize-Actualize the Tree in the Knower by connecting to the Tree of Life and embodying your valuable place in the Garden under God.” I will be the unpacking this profound process-oriented aspiration, its implications, and framing within UTOK later in the series.
Eschatology
According to Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, eschatology is the study of or doctrine about the end of history or the last things. Eschatology is a branch of Christian theology, and the term still finds its primary home in that context, but it is also used broadly to cover any theory about the end of human life or of the world. From TIK viewpoint, we consider the end of our individual life and those implications, the end of an age as our industrial, modern civilization unchecked in material growth, and the end of our world on earth. I will unpack this further after describing the ontology of self, epistemic of full spectrum mindfulness, and axiology of UTIK.
Conclusion
This provides a brief summary of the philosophy of my PTOK. The UTIK invitation is for you to consider your philosophy and frame it using these categories. Part of UTOK is helping us all get clearer on how we understand the world, and UTIK’s goal is helping us increase our own explicit framing. In addition to our philosophical understanding, there is also our experience of being in the world and the way we bring in information via our senses to generate awareness and reflect on who and where we are in the big picture. In Part II, I will lay out my approach to full-spectrum, multimodal mindfulness, and share how I frame awareness, attention, the psychological self, and meta-reflection.
